Tag "Global warming"

brainwaves Which phrase does a better job of grabbing people’s attention: “global warming” or “climate change”?
If you want to get people to care, try “climate crisis,” suggests new research from an advertising consulting agency in New York.
SPARK Neuro measures brain activity and sweaty palms to gauge people’s emotional reactions and attention to stimuli.
And now SPARK Neuro is turning its attention to climate change.
“Global warming” and “climate change” performed the worst of all in terms of emotional engagement and audience attention.
He pointed to the “estate tax,” which normal people didn’t care much about until Republicans started rebranding it as the “death tax” in the 1990s.
If a term doesn’t evoke a strong emotional response in the first place, it’s even more likely to wear out quickly, Gerrol said.
People who care about our warming planet are starting to realize the power of words.
The company’s work has been called a “lie detector on steroids.” For the messaging experiment, participants were first shown neutral stimuli to establish a baseline.
That kind of response leads people to pay more attention and encourages a sense of urgency, Gerrol said.

Afterwards, the ocean’s overturning circulation distributes it: ocean currents and mixing processes transport the dissolved CO2 from the surface deep into the ocean’s interior, where it accumulates over time.
The size of this sink is very important for the atmospheric CO2 levels: without this sink, the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and the extent of anthropogenic climate change would be considerably higher. “Over the examined period, the global ocean continued to take up anthropogenic CO2 at a rate that is congruent with the increase of atmospheric CO2 ,” Gruber explains.
The North Atlantic Ocean, for instance, absorbed 20 per cent less CO2 than expected between 1994 and 2007. “This is probably due to the slowdown of the North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in the late 1990s, which itself is most likely a consequence of climate variability,” Gruber explains.
Gruber emphasises: “We learned that the marine sink does not just respond to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
Using observations obtained from the very first global CO2 survey conducted between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, that study estimated that the ocean had taken up around 118 gigatonnes of carbon from the beginning of industrialisation around 1800 until 1994.
Increasing CO2 content acidifies marine habitats By moderating the rate of global warming, the oceanic sink for man-made CO2 provides an important service for humanity, but it has its price: the CO2 dissolved in the ocean acidifies the water. “Our data has shown that this acidification reaches deep into the ocean’s interior, extending in part to depths of more than 3000 m,” Gruber says.
Gruber is convinced: “Documenting the chemical changes imparted on the ocean as a result of human activity is crucial, not least to understand the impact of these changes on marine life.”

A die-off of sea stars so massive that scientists believe it could be the largest disease epidemic ever observed in wild marine animals has been linked in a new study to global warming.
Scientists believe a disease once of little concern has been wiping out the sea star population because of warming waters.
Researchers discovered that sea star devastation appeared to be particularly marked where water temperatures are highest, such as in shallow waters near the shore — though oceans water temperatures are generally also increasing.
The “marine heat wave” is triggering a “continental-scale collapse of a pivotal predator,” the study notes.
Since 2013, sea star wasting disease has “caused massive, ongoing mortality from Mexico to Alaska,” the study states.
“What we think is that the warm water anomalies made these starfish more susceptible to the disease that was already out there,” study author Joe Gaydos, the science director of the SeaDoc Society at the University of California at Davis, told NPR.
Dying sea stars can trigger a cascading ecological collapse as animals that depend on the creatures suffer in turn — and animals the sea stars eat can proliferate in destructive numbers once the sea stars are gone.
The population of sea urchins once eaten by healthy sea stars has exploded in areas without the predators.
The urchins then gobble up sea kelp, destroying kelp forest ecosystems.
“We have higher biodiversity when we have more kelp.

Have Salad for Lunch Today and Every Day American homes produce an average of 8.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually through their food and energy consumption.
With less contamination at the curbside, there will be more profit in each ton of plastic, paper, metal, e-waste, and other recyclables.
Volunteer to Reduce Food Waste The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 30 to 40 percent of food grown and produced in the country is wasted, going to landfills or spoiling instead of feeding people.
Get a Home Energy Audit and Act The house, apartment, or condo in which you live probably needs an upgrade to take advantage of modern materials that lower energy use and costs.
Using your home energy audit, you can make decisions about where to invest with an understanding of the savings and incentives you can collect.
Stop Stealth Electronics Energy Waste Smart homes are always consuming power.
Recycle 100 Pounds of Unused Metal Here’s a chance to make some money while feeling good about your contribution to the planet.
Ban Unnecessary Plastics From Home Single-use plastic and plastic pollution go hand-in-hand, it is ubiquitous and wasteful.
We can and must do a better job, as recycled plastic reduces energy used to make new products.
Let’s make the most of them.

A California federal judge has rejected the efforts of municipal officials who teamed with private lawyers to seek to hold the energy industry liable for the alleged future effects of climate change.
The plaintiffs in the consolidated cases – the cities of San Francisco and Oakland – and their private lawyers face significant legal hurdles in their attempt to use the common law claim of “public nuisance” to force the companies to pay for infrastructure that would combat rising sea levels.
Critics of the cases – which have also been filed by other California governments, New York City, three Colorado governments and King County, WA – said it was improper to ask a court to force liability on companies that are in compliance with federal regulations.
“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” wrote Alsup, the first judge in any of the cases to issue a ruling on dismissal arguments.
“While it remains true that our federal courts have authority to fashion common law remedies for claims based on global warming, courts must also respect and defer to the other co-equal branches of government when the problem at hand clearly deserves a solution best addressed by those branches.” Another blow to private lawyers hoping to earn a percentage of the recovery could be coming in the case filed by New York City, where a federal judge seemed less than impressed by the plaintiff’s arguments during a recent dismissal hearing.
“Although the scope of plaintiffs’ claims is determined by federal law, there are sound reasons why regulation of the worldwide problem of global warming should be determined by our political branches, not by the judiciary,” Alsup wrote.
Alsup noted that he felt the plaintiffs’ claims were governed by federal law, but that federal law should not be used to create the relief requested.
Having also conducted a sort-of seminar on climate change science, he decided global warming is real.
Their causes are worldwide.
The benefits of fossil fuels are worldwide,” he wrote.

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